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Monthly Archives: October 2017

BWW, Before the Worldwide Web, teachers stored everything in manila folders in a bank of file cabinets in the back of their classroom. Authentic resources were limited to physical items such as books, magazines, art prints, newspapers, posters, CDs, VHS movies, maps, schedules, and product labels and packaging.

Today, although many language teachers adorn their classrooms with some of the resources listed above that they have accumulated over the years, the internet has changed the game. The students now have 24/7 to real life authentic video, audio, text, and images.

So, it is only logical that in the 21st century, there are technology solutions for storing our authentic resources. Here are a few:

Google Drive: Google Drive is a convenient choice because many teachers now store their lesson plans, student work, slide presentations, surveys, and other documents in Google. You can upload images, videos, and audio files there. The downside of using Google Drive is that there is no way to upload links to it. So, if you want to capture a link, you would need to copy it and paste it into a Google Doc and save that doc. Given the link, students can access files in the Drive electronically. Here is an example of a teacher’s Google Drive folder that contains resources for a Career IPA:

2. Blendspace (tes teach): Blendspace allows you to collect multimedia for interactive lessons on a particular topic. It allows you to store digital content with files in the same location. Here is an example of a teacher’s Blendspace page for an IPA on Health and Wellness in Spanish. As with Google Drive, students can access the Blendspace page online:

3. Pinterest: Pinterest is my favorite place to store links and online items. You can organize your “boards” by theme or category. Once you have set up boards, Pinterest will recommend “pins” to you based on the themes you have chosen. It is also possible on Pinterest to “follow” certain “pinners” who are also teachers of the same language. You will then be alerted when they add pins to their boards. Here’s an example of a Pinterest board for the AP Global Theme of Global Challenges for German:

And here is the result of a search in Pinterest for the AP theme of Contemporary Life for French which yields many boards on the topic:

All of the above mentioned online solutions to storing authentic resources are dynamic not static, and therefore allow you delete and add files/links as needed.